Nicki Minaj recently identified herself as “neurodivergent” in a series of now-deleted posts on the social media website X. “Neurodivergents watching our leader Elon be the richest & smartest while the others realize they’re cooked,” she wrote, referring to tech billionaire Elon Musk, who has said he’s autistic. Her words were in response to a post quoting Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir, one of the world’s biggest tech companies: “The future is neurodivergent.”
“Neurodivergent” is an umbrella term that describes people whose minds differ from what society considers normal. It can encompass a number of conditions and is most commonly associated with autism and ADHD today.
What was once an extremely niche term in neurodiversity and disability activist circles is now in the purview of pop stars, business leaders and politicians.
Kassiane Asasumasu, an early neurodiversity advocate, is widely credited with coining the term in the late ’90s. The word was the result of “a pedantic, neurodivergent kid (me) having access to the Internet,” she told The 19th. Specifically, she was annoyed that people were using “neurodiverse” as a descriptor for individual people or individual diagnoses.
“A single entity is not diverse,” Asasumasu told The 19th.
Asasumasu also wanted a term that could encompass not just autism, but also other neurological conditions, mental illness or even just being different.
“It’s not a specific diagnosis. There is not a list of qualifying conditions. There will never be a list of qualifying conditions,” Asasumasu said. “However big you think it is, bigger than that.”
There were other competing terms, some of which predated “neurodivergent,” according to Ira Eidle. Eidle is a student archivist who maintains The Autistic Archive, one of the only repositories of documents from the early neurodiversity movement. Eidle put The Autistic Archive together prior to entering academia and is in the process of using the knowledge he has gained to update and improve the website. The earliest usage he could find for the word “neurodivergent” was from 2002.
One earlier phrase that Eidle counts as significant? “Autistic cousins,” frequently abbreviated to “AC.”
“Autistic cousins” is a term first used at Autism Network International, one of the first autistic self-advocacy organizations in the early ’90s, Eidle said. “It happened after a conference where they had somebody with hydrocephalus in their group who was not autistic, but he could acutely relate to a lot of their experiences. So somebody named Xenia Grant claimed him as a cousin. The term stuck,” he said.
“Autistic cousins” was not a term for political organizing. It was more of a term to include non-autistic people who wanted to explore autistic spaces. By contrast, Asasumasu sees “neurodivergent” as an exercise in political coalition-building, comparing it to the phrase “Asian American.”
“In Asia, people aren’t ‘Asian.’ They’re Chinese or Japanese or Korean or Mongolian or Thai or whatever their specific ethnicity is. But in the Asian diaspora, we need to lump together to have any political power,” she said. “Neurodivergent” serves the same function, Asasumasu explained: to unite people with a number of different conditions under one banner for political organizing purposes.
That is not, however, how the word is frequently used today. Often, it will only refer to autism without intellectual disability, as well as ADHD. Sometimes it is used as a euphemism to avoid discussing disability. And sometimes, it is even used to talk about autistic people or people with ADHD as superior intellectual and creative beings, perhaps more evolved than other people.
This is how people like Musk and others on the political right frequently conceive of the term, according to Esther Warwick, a longtime researcher of disability, particularly autism, and political extremism. Warwick is the executive director of an emerging organization called Disability Communities Defending Democracy, which aims to combat political extremism in disability spaces.
Warwick noted that historically, disability was more of a mixed bag politically. Support for disabled people and disability issues could be found across the political spectrum. That changed in 2017, when a fight over Medicaid funding for people with disabilities became a partisan flashpoint. At the same time, people on the right and far-right began to embrace a very specific vision of neurodiversity and who counts as “neurodivergent.”
“In the early days of the alt-right, blogs were promoting neurodiversity as a kind of — whether it was genuine or not — that we are these special types of people who are different, and that makes us know better than the globalists,” Warwick told The 19th.
This right-wing version of “neurodiversity” does not include people with intellectual disabilities or anything else that may require substantial disability support. Instead, it is narrowly applied to those whose differences can be of use. The phrase “weaponized autism” came to refer to intense focus and deep expertise paired with social challenges, applied to achieve particular political ends.
Melanie Penner co-authored one of the first papers examining the connection between autism and the far right. Penner is a developmental pediatrician and associate professor at University of Toronto. She first became interested after the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. It was where white supremacists from all over the country gathered with tiki torches and one counterprotester was killed after a Neo-Nazi rammed his car into a crowd.
“I had been, as most people, disturbed by what had happened. But what was more disturbing to me was hearing some of the experts talking about it afterward, saying that they had heard a lot of mentions of autism in these extremely xenophobic spaces,” Penner told The 19th.
One phrase, in particular, stood out to Penner: “weaponized autism.” It’s the idea that people with the neurodevelopmental condition could be harnessed to further far-right political goals. She and other researchers decided to analyze how the term “weaponized autism” was used in far-right spaces — particularly on the far-right social media platform Gab.
“Autistic people in these spaces are still stigmatized, laughed at. But there is this kind of compassion and a companion piece of being celebrated for their skills,” she said. However, that celebration was largely based on stereotypes.
“In the paper, we use the phrase ‘all-powerful masters of technology.’ So autistic people are perceived to have these abilities that other people don’t have, that can be harnessed by these groups toward their kind of political ends or particular actions they want to do, like doxxing people or hacking activities,” Penner said.
Warwick more explicitly connected the online use of “weaponized autism” to how Musk, who has frequently supported far-right causes, conceptualizes his own autism.
“Elon Musk is trying to bring back this idea of autism as a sort of pure expression of White masculinity. It’s a huge throwback to 2010s Reddit. I mean, everything Elon Musk does is a huge throwback to 2010s Reddit. There was this sort of pro-autism, pro-neurodiversity in some sense on the far right. It’s often explicitly racist,” Warwick said. “Weaponized autism” flourished online, and Warwick believes Musk is very much a product of that culture.
Minaj was not on Gab, 4Chan or any far-right online space in the 2010s, or at least not as far as anyone is aware. Recently, she has become increasingly involved in right-wing politics. She frequently supports President Donald Trump and is currently encouraging her fans, known as Barbz, to support the SAVE America Act, which could make it more difficult for many women and people of color to vote.
Minaj talked about being neurodivergent on social media as early as 2022, although she did not use that word: “Honestly, I think It’s one of the many embarrassing signs of ADHD, actually. For some ppl… Not diagnosing, just thinking out loud,” she wrote. At the time, it didn’t appear to have any particular political valence.
Using “neurodivergent” might be a new way for her to think about her identity.
Asasamasu said she doesn’t have a problem with Minaj identifying as “neurodivergent.”
“I am not actually the neurodivergence police,” she said.
She draws the line, however, at calling Elon Musk her “leader.”
“No. Absolutely not.”